THE current debate on the quality of the IITs and IIMs is an excellent illustration of just how the problem as to what ails higher education today is being misrecognized. It is apparent that despite adequate financial support (at a level that is ten times what is given elsewhere) and elite status, these institutions have failed the nation. Yet, while it is generally and grudgingly accepted that the neglect of research by their faculty has prevented these institutions from becoming ‘world class’, the greater (and real) failure lies in not being able to integrate the mission of extension with their teaching and research. This is reflected in their graduates’ lack of connection with our economy and society, a failure yet to be highlighted in current discussions.

This cannot be brushed aside with the defence that there are more CEOs and start-ups coming out of IITs/IIMs since liberalization. The question remains: Why are such enterprises still marginal to the domestic economy? Is it because they are largely serving those businesses for which readymade markets exist due to the expansion in outsourcing opportunities? It is, for instance, inadequately realized that despite meagre financial support, it is the non-elite institutions that continue to be the backbone of the country’s departments of space, atomic energy, thermal and hydro power, and our private and public sector industrial units. It is here that the neo-liberal policy regime, which has generally favoured reduced state funding to the non-elite sectors of higher education and the privatization of technical education has inflicted the greatest damage. No wonder even Indian business is finally discovering that close to half our engineering and management products are unemployable.

A framework for the governance of higher education thus needs to be re-envisioned with the aim of integrating a sense of national purpose into all types of higher education institutions (HEIs). It is mainly due to such a lack of integration that HEIs today face an acute crisis of credibility. Wastage in higher education is another growing concern. Both public and private colleges and departments of state universities, which offer standard degree programmes to the largest proportion of students across the entire range of engineering, science, social science, arts and humanities, continue to turn out ‘ill prepared’ and unproductive graduates. The challenge of governance reforms thus cannot be merely reduced to regulating the privatization of the system or making the state commit to a higher level of funding.

The debate on the National Commission on Higher Education and Research (NCHER) bill must thus be directed towards the question whether the proposed framework of governance can address these challenges and attack the roots of the present crisis. It is no coincidence, as revealed by an examination of the history of the University Grants Commission (UGC) Act of 1956, that the central government foreclosed debate without arriving at satisfactory solutions either for joint planning between Centre, states and the academic community or for dealing with the legacies of a colonial system of higher education. It tried to address the issue of autonomy of the states and universities by promising non-interference and by making appropriate amendments concerning withdrawal of recognition and closure of universities by the Centre. But the promises made by the central government on either joint planning mechanisms or university design were never fulfilled. Unfortunately, the memory not only of people in general but also of the political leadership of every hue, has been short. No one in the academic community has pursued them either.

 

The Radhakrishnan Commission (RC) was the first (and last) committee to discuss how India might inculcate a national purpose into higher education through the implementation of appropriately chosen university design and joint planning. The RC’s proposal for the establishment of ‘rural universities’ was guided by an understanding that the universities established by the colonial masters – besides some qualitative limitations – had only touched the fringes of the world’s newest and most populous democracy. It began by highlighting that, as reported by the 1941 census, about 85% of the population of India lived in villages. It further argued that new, free beginnings were possible, unhampered by the colonial past, by taking advantage of advances in world educational thought and practice. Given the tendency of an old and dominant institution to impose itself on any new institution in a similar field, it is a matter of practical necessity that new universities aiming at extending educational opportunities to the great mass of rural India by giving vitality and quality to rural life, should have their own independent design and programme.

 

The way the RC addressed the issue of integration of national purpose into the design of rural universities is quite instructive. India was asked to decide whether to aim at its largest sections, making villages prosperous, interesting and culturally rich places, with such a range of opportunity and adventure that young people would find more interesting, more culturally advantageous, and with more pioneering opportunities there, than in the city; or whether to turn to centralized industries, with labour taking direction either from the state or from private corporations. It noted that there should be no feeling of conflict between existing and new types of (rural) universities, any more than between engineering and medical education. However, it suggested that because the pattern and spirit of existing universities is so distinctly urban centric, massive pioneering efforts would be required for evolving new institutions of higher learning to serve the needs and aspirations of our democracy.

The commission stressed that rural universities would share many of the qualities and methods of existing universities and, further, that there would be cooperation and interaction, whether with the European universities or with institutions in America, a relation of consultation, friendship and advice but not of authority. For this to happen, however, a disruption of the ‘natural drift’ through definite governmental and educational policy and a change of public attitude was required. To cut a long story short, the drift continued; the planning and orientation of agricultural universities was handed over to teams led by the Rockefeller and Ford Foundations supported by the two agreements signed for Indo-American science and technology cooperation in 1955 and 1960 which, unsurprisingly, completely violated the rural university design model proposed by the commission.

 

The RC’s rural university had aimed at the integration of teaching and research and made the functions of teaching, research and extension subordinate to the requirements of the selected pathway of development. Extension was not a spillover to be harnessed. Knowledge (re)production would perform by contributing to the goals of rural-urban development ‘Indian style’. Similarly, when the commission recommended the formation of ‘city universities’, it recognized that rural and urban universities should supplement each other through a framework of regional development. It argued that since universities had so far been established to meet the needs of cities or limited areas, fresh thought needed to be given to the formation of regional universities to serve the distinct requirements of diverse natural, linguistic, cultural or economic regions.

The commission was clear that the full genius of a country can develop only with freedom to create variety; that foreign control could best advance itself by regimented uniformity. It also recognized that given a tendency towards bureaucratic unimaginativeness and administrative convenience, regimented authority had become a habit of mind in Indian higher education. The commission, therefore, recommended that when the UGC was to decide the degree of recognition and support to be given to any institution, the criteria should not be the likeness of that institution to others of a standard type, but a judgment about whether that institution is making a substantial contribution to the economic, intellectual, cultural and spiritual life of India.

 

The establishment of the mechanism of joint planning for such requirements by the Centre and states was to be decided by the executive under the UGC Act of 1956. At the level of statutory provisions, however, there was little clarity as to how the Centre and states would carry this out. With no fresh thinking, the growing mismatch between demand and supply sides was further compounded by a systemic failure to make connections between subsequent developments in the economy with those in education. Consequently, when the system faced a crisis in the late sixties, the central government had the upper hand with states possessing little space for manoeuvre. By 1973, the crisis of purpose and credibility became the visible face of the non-elite system of higher education. Traced to the multiple failures of political leadership in relation to the rural-urban divide, lack of social justice, economic underdevelopment and corruption, the ferment on all of these was led by students, disenchanted with higher education.

If the source of the present crisis is both inadequate funding of the non-elite institutions and insufficient integration of national purpose anywhere, then the NCHER bill is bad medicine. The UPA government is guilty of completely going back on the recommendations of the Radhakrishnan Commission. Unfortunately, even the democratic sections of the teachers’ and students’ movements are unable to provide concrete solutions to tackle the crisis of purpose and credibility because of their one-sided focus on funding and privatization alone. An alternate framework of governance is needed.

 

The NCHER bill proposes a highly centralized framework for the promotion and regulation of both the private and public providers of education. If implemented, all entities would be effectively governed by the rules and norms of the market. Tribunals are to provide the dispute settlement mechanisms in the institutional arrangements being proposed. As things stand today, the NCHER bill allows for only a semblance of partnership between the Centre and states. In practice, all powers and functions are located in a newly constituted executive in the form of a commission consisting of the chairperson, members, the collegium and the governing council, which has been accorded all the necessary powers to decide, advise and facilitate the establishment of universities, the appointment of vice-chancellors and heads of central educational institutions, and the commencement of academic operations by institutions of higher education and research.

It is not clear how the select few sitting in the commission can decide through expert committees with regard to all the fields of knowledge needed in the country to meet its developmental challenges. Just how would the preparation of eligibility conditions or the directory of academics for the appointment of vice-chancellors ensure a commitment to autonomy and accountability of all the faculty? It seems that the rhetoric of failure of the existing system is evidence enough for the new policy-makers. With a view to promote privatization and self-financing, new funding arrangements are proposed in the NCHER bill. The bill provides for the setting up of a Higher Education Financial Services Corporation to receive funds from the Union government for disbursal to the universities.

Not only will the academic community have a limited role to decide about the content of education, in such a governance framework little space would exist for the achievement of public policy goals. The answer embedded in the NCHER bill is that the market will take care of the integration of national purpose and inefficiencies noticed in respect of the needs of the working classes. The NCHER bill has not even designed separate mechanisms for those areas of educational demand that are linked to the strategic interest of the nation as a whole or to the collective problems of the specific regions that are not going to be served by the market. There is also the question of educational programmes which are solely academic, directed towards critical intellectual enquiry. No effective mechanism has been provided to the political leadership, academics or users to redress such failures.

 

The needs of ‘joint planning’ go beyond the arrangements of formal participation of the states or of the representation of different types of knowledge users in the policy-making body that the NCHER bill proposes at the national level. In policy-making bodies room can always be made for the participation of different stakeholders along with the various sections of the academic community. Even the principle of social control needs to have meaning beyond the achievement of social justice in the form of affirmative action. A meaningful ‘alternate governance framework’ needs to ensure that the activities of higher education are not geared to merely responding to the preferences of the middle classes. It should ensure, at the level of integration of purpose, all those activities which can help develop the competencies of all its citizens (peasants, artisans, rural labour, small businesses, patients and ordinary people).

 

The alternate governance framework would have to consciously pave the way for university designs that facilitate the construction of new pathways of development to avoid the recurrence of mismatches and gaps. The Indian system of higher education should be providing the country with knowledge and skill for sustainable livelihoods and the systemic development of local economies.

Experience suggests that global market forces prefer to foster uniformity in higher education institutions (HEIs) and homogenize cultures. Achievements of ecological sustainability and social justice are not merely a matter of implementing affirmative action and picking up some ready-made green technologies from the market. Only by constructing distinct pathways of sustainability will the enterprises and occupations of the deprived be able to contribute to the achievement of ecological and social justice. Multi-level decentralized planning can play an important role in the creation of educational programmes for the benefit of subaltern classes; they would allow the working people to organize themselves better for emulation as well as competition with globalized big business.

An alternate governance framework would have to recognize that the country also needs to deliver competencies for publicly valued knowledge based services of natural resource management, technological upgrading of unorganized industries, development of technological infrastructure for area based development, development of education for meeting the needs of SMEs, development and maintenance of civic infrastructure and services for appropriate water, energy and transport management, environmental protection, sustainable development of habitat (housing, public space, recreation, slum transformation for better quality of life and livelihoods for urban poor), pre-school education, public provisioning for crèches and delivery of childcare, integrated systems of medicine and healthcare, continuing education, development of elementary education, planning of socio-economic development, promotion of democratic culture, cultivation of local arts, social regulation of citizen rights and duties and so on.

 

Such a governance framework would need to provide the enabling instruments for the participation of the larger democratic movement in the development of education in their neighbourhoods. While the mechanisms of steering, planning, funding and evaluation of departments or disciplines covering the academic fields of sciences, engineering, social sciences, arts and humanities can continue to be managed at the level of the UGC and AICTE, we nevertheless need new arrangements for the development of centres of excellence in education and research for the benefit of areas of social demand which the established disciplines/specialities are able to ignore and which require to be finalized in consultation with user groups.

 

All these new arrangements of joint planning could be made operational through the establishment of state level councils of higher education and research. State level councils can also be induced to support the incubation of (state level and local area – district/cluster of districts level) user groups for the planning and implementation of such innovations in educational programmes. Simultaneously, we need new sector wide councils for the development of decentralized processes of planning and funding of research and education to meet the unmet social demand in education, health, food and agriculture, rural industries, habitat development, information and communication, natural resources, environmental protection. In this way the governance framework would be doing a better job for the classes whose interests we wish to advance in an accelerated manner.

So far we have the experience of setting up elite public universities as self-organized bodies. The principle of social control needs to be taken forward. An alternate governance framework demands that academic activity should also be accountable to the people by suitably partnering with relevant user groups. Of course, every educational programme would have to come up to the prescribed standards of integrated scholarship. Fortunately, some of the trade unions, developmental NGOs, people’s science movements (PSMs) have teams that are better motivated to incubate innovative educational programmes. They can be mobilized by social and political movements to initiate experiments and implement innovations in HEIs around this alternate perspective.